Hymns and Big Ooopses

This is a post I really should have put up a week ago Sunday instead of today. During the last hymn on our service on October 15th, I found myself smacking myself in the forehead.

As I always try to do, I usually try to keep closing hymns as familiar as possible... if not in words, certain in the way of music. On October 15th, the closing hymn was #370 "Hallelujah, Sing to Jesus." The words are not as familiar, but the tune is the same as "Come, thou long expected Jesus." --Generally a well known one.

But there was a small problem... people were getting lost when we were singing the hymn.

There are some small instances when I realize that the Book of Praise, took some shortcuts in order to save page space. They put in musical notation that the first line of the first verse needs to be repeated. For someone like me, who is quite musically literate, this is pretty much a given. I followed it without even thinking about it, but to my horror, I could hear the congregation losing track of where they were... and with the start of each verse they were getting lost again. I could also hear that people were getting frustrated.

In retrospect, whenever hymns like this come up that the music notation makes the verses difficult to read, I am going to take a moment ahead of singing the hymn to make sure we're all on the same page and going in the same direction...

Sigh... live and learn...